the truth took some real mental cojones.
Oliver’s post was titled “Former Game Designer Paul Reynolds: Black
Hat Hacker Mastermind?” OK, so that wasn’t quite right, but it might
as well have been, and it was a catchy enough title that it was likely to
catch the eyes of plenty of curious surfers. She saw the Digg and Reddit
links along the side and saw it was already collecting links that would
bring it to the front page and thus to the attention of millions within
days if not hours. Right below the title was that goofy picture of Paul
from his old company’s website, looking like a goober. Ugh, that hair.
He’d lost weight and filled out some since then, and his hair was shorter
and a different color, but he still looked pretty much the same in all the
important, identify him in a line-up kind of ways.
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Oliver’s post scrolled down for inches upon inches of screen real
estate. Chloe guessed it was at least 8000 words long. He started off
smart, with a lead line designed to keep the reader interested: “Wanted
con man and former lead designer of the hit MMORPG
Metropolis 2.0
is linked to a ring of black hat hackers who’ve been recruiting at con-
ventions for their criminal conspiracy.” Not only engaging but entirely
true. After that, Oliver went into his own story and told a version that
was very much edited down from what he’d spilled to Heidi and the
other Shmoo Groupers. In this public version someone named Toni
approached him at Toor Con and offered him thousands of dollars
to use his ace pen testing skills to hack into a private company’s data-
base. He’d of course refused, and the mysterious, beautiful woman
disappeared. Then he’d seen her again at Shmoocon last week and of
course immediately reported it to the security staff. After that, one of
the other attendees reported being approached by the same mysterious
woman, who tried to lure the attendee to her hotel room. The attendee
brought along a Shmoocon security person, and the mystery woman
was spooked and disappeared once again.
Once the con was over, Oliver decided to find out what had really
happened. He started scouring the Web for other signs of these con
artists, and before long he found them. They’d also been trying to
recruit people in certain hacker IRC channels (Chloe laughed at this—
it wasn’t true, but maybe someone else was), offering high bounties for
cracking systems. From there Oliver had used some of his connections
from the pen testing profession to get a law enforcement friend of his
to pull some of the security tapes from the Shmoocon hotel. This was
where Chloe really started cursing. They’d done their best to avoid those
cameras, always making sure to keep faces turned away from them
when possible. Oliver said he wasn’t allowed to look himself, but he’d
given his friend a description of Toni and he came back with a couple
of stills taken from the tapes. They showed her entering and leaving the
hotel, but not any of her interacting with the con attendees. However,
one clear shot in the hotel lobby showed her walking almost next to a
figure that seemed very familiar to Oliver. He’d taken the still of both
Toni and the guy who seemed familiar and run them through facial
recognition software and started searching images from across Flikr
and Google Image search using some choice key words to narrow the
field. After a good long chunk of processing time he’d come up with a
match: Paul Reynolds.
Then Oliver went into the whole sordid tale of the disastrous failed
con they’d tried to pull in San Jose and the subsequent fall out. He not
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only tracked down all the media coverage from the time it happened,
but then did some follow-up, contacting some of Paul’s former co-
workers. Although the CEO of Fear and Loading Games, Greg, refused
to comment, the CTO Frank was more than happy to rant about what
Paul had done, along with “that bitch” who he’d worked with. Oliver
made the incorrect assumption that Paul’s cohort was the same as the
woman he knew as Toni, but that was hardly a comfort. The result was
clear: Paul was a con man and generally horrible person who’d attacked
Frank and tried to steal millions of dollars from conservative donors.
But what to make of all this? Oliver said he was going public with
this information so hackers could be on guard against Paul and Toni
and whoever else they were working with. He encouraged everyone
to circulate their pictures and the whole story. He also set up a wiki
devoted to Hunting Paul Reynolds that could serve as a focal point
and central repository for any information anyone discovered about
the mystery group. In the meantime, despite whatever personal danger
or professional risks he might be taking, Oliver would continue his
hunt for these “evil-doers” who were giving the hacking community
a bad name.
“Well, that blows,” Chloe announced to the room. Paul was on her
phone talking to Bee, and Sacco was looking confused and pulling on
his pants. “But I don’t think it’s the end of the world.”
“Hold on, Bee,” Paul said, covering the phone with his hand before
answering. “There’s a lot of fucking room between good and the end
of the world, and this is definitely on the bad end of the spectrum. But
right now I’m trying to convince Bee to not panic over the fact that
c1sman’s apparently panicking.”
Great, thought Chloe, listening as Paul said all the right things to
Bee. Sacco stared at her, confused, probably wondering what was going
on. Or maybe just because she was stranding in the middle of the room
without any clothes on. She explained what was going on while she got
dressed and then the three of them headed back home. Bee was upstairs
in her lair with Sandee, so the five of them crowded into the sealed, com-
puter-stuffed room to plan strategy. In addition to mismatched monitors
showing street scenes from all over Key West courtesy of their secret
network of hidden cameras, Bee had thrown up Oliver’s blog and then
a dozen or so other sites that had linked to it or were discussing it.
“I’m famous again,” said Paul, voice even and calm in a bitter kind
of way.
“More famous than ever,” said Sandee. “I’m sorry Chloe, you were
right, we should’ve done something about Oliver.”
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“I don’t know what we could’ve done to stop this,” she said. “It hap-
pened fast and he’s obviously got a bug up his ass about the whole
damn thing. We would’ve had to really scare the fuck out of him in a
serious way, and you were right, he doesn’t deserve that. He hasn’t done
anything wrong.”
“But I do deserve it,” said Paul.
“I’m not saying that.”
“No, I’m saying that. I do in fact deserve this. It’s all true, or at least
true enough.”
She could sense him slipping into one of his dark moods, but she
wasn’t at all sure how to pull him out of it.
“Should we go after the site?” Sacco said. “Maybe not hack it, I mean
the story’s out there. But we could try discrediting it. Throw up some
chaff. Maybe release the real details about what Oliver’s done that’s
illegal. Or just make some shit up.”
“It’s going to be hard to fight truth with lies,” said Paul as he scrolled
through the comment thread on Digg.
“You’ve obviously never watched the evening news, then,” Sacco
countered. “Lies win out all the time. We just need to give them a bet-
ter story to chew on.”
“No, we really don’t,” said Paul.
“Are you giving up?” Chloe said, although the words didn’t come out
the way she meant them to.
He looked at her as if she’d accused him of something. “No, I’m being
realistic. Think about it for a minute.”
“Why don’t you just tell me.”
“Fine. Look, this doesn’t change anything. It’s awkward and fucked
up and makes me look bad and is probably freaking out my family and
old friends, or it will if they ever see it, but fine. Whatever. I haven’t
been able to talk to them in a couple years anyway, right? It’s not like I
ever forgot I was wanted on suspicion of kidnapping and felony fraud.
I know that. Now a lot of other people know it too, and there’s nothing
we can do about it.”
“Some kind of damage control might be in order,” said Chloe, watch-
ing him slip into what he called his “slough of despond” right before
her eyes. Whenever she got hit with a setback, her first instinct was to
hit back.
“It will just make things worse,” said Paul. “Listen, think about it,
OK? Oliver is right in every detail that matters about me, but wrong on
everything that has to do with why we were actually in Washington. We
weren’t really recruiting people and we weren’t really screwing around
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with anything at Shmoocon besides piggy backing on their network
and TOR set up. All this stuff of Oliver’s, it’s old news. Were we going
to recruit new Crewmembers from other hacker cons? Maybe, I guess,
but we don’t need to. Oliver’s drumming up a posse to come after me,
but he’s looking at where we’ve been, not where we’re going. As long
as we stay careful—OK, extra, super careful—and change things up,
there won’t be any trail for him to follow. It’s an internet thing, a flash
in the pan. We need to ride it out. We’re flush with cash, so let’s just
take some time and let it all sort itself out.”
Chloe nodded. She didn’t want to argue with him and thought he was
making sense, even if it wasn’t what she wanted to do. Except she didn’t
know what she wanted to do exactly. Better to go with Paul’s plan until
she actually came up with something better. “OK, that works. I see your
point. We’ll watch this shit real close, track what happens as best we
can, but take no active measures. Everyone good with that?”
She looked around the room. Paul was back to reading the comment
thread, but Bee, Sacco, and Sandee all nodded in agreement. They
broke the meeting up and went back down into the house, leaving Paul
to follow up with c1sman and try and calm him down. Chloe noticed a
little weirdness between Sandee and Sacco as they descended the stairs.
In the sober light of morning, she imagined Sacco might be having
some confused thoughts about the fun he’d had last night, while Sandee
had been through this morning after thing often enough (including
with Chloe and Paul) to know that he needed to stay friendly and casual
but give Sacco his space. She hoped it didn’t fuck things up between
them. It certainly had been hella hot at the time. Back downstairs she
made coffee and then went for a run, hoping that things would return
to normal in the next couple days.
It got bad before other things got even worse. The story didn’t just fade
into obscurity after a few hours on the front page of various social net-
working news sites. A number of tech news and then some mainstream
news sites picked it up, as did most of the video game sites.
Wired
had it
too. Paul’s face—that same stupid picture—went up all over the place.
Then the podcasts of course had to mention it, and Paul and “Toni”
became a topic of brief snark and mild curiosity on Buzz Out Loud,
TWIT, and of course all the hacker ‘casts. Paul listened to every one of
them, despite Chloe’s encouragement to avoid them. At least they didn’t
seem to make him any more angry or depressed, although they did a
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good job at holding his bleak mood at its current level.
Posts went up defending Paul in some of these stories too, and when
the details (mostly wrong) about their exploits in San Jose came out, a
certain subset started to view him as some kind of hero figure because
he was an outlaw who was trying to stick it to the man in some way.
Paul didn’t like these posts either for whatever reason, but Chloe got
kind of a kick out of them. That is until she overheard Sacco repeat-
ing some of the Paul-praising pretty much verbatim and forced him to
admit that he’d started some of the pro-Paul movement (including, of
all things, a fan page on Facebook) himself. “Just don’t tell Paul, OK.
And stop messing with it. We’re just watching.” Sacco agreed, but they
both knew it didn’t matter now: the movement had taken on a life of its
own. Someone even started selling t-shirts with a heavily photoshopped
version of that damn picture that put a beret on Paul and made him
look like Che Guevara on it.
Laying low and watching might have been the smart move, but Chloe
soon became desperate for some other form of distraction. Going to The
Party was a bad idea according to Paul, who (probably wisely) decided
that he shouldn’t be seen in public at all for a while unless he was heavily
disguised. Towards that end he’d started growing a beard, which was
coming in patchy and scratchy and annoying the hell out of her, but she
kept her mouth shut about that too. That left sitting around the house